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News Posted on March 6, 2012

Professor Chander Speaks on "How Law Made Silicon Valley" in IEEE Podcast

Professor Anupam Chander was interviewed about his work-in-progress paper "How Law Made Silicon Valley" for a "Techwise Conversations" podcast produced by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

In the paper, Professor Chander asserts that the success of Silicon Valley as a center of online entrepreneurial activity largely has been the result of changes in American copyright and tort law during the 1990s that dramatically reduced the risks faced by Web 2.0 startups with regard to intermediary liability and privacy issues. Professor Chander further suggests that members of Congress should take these factors into consideration as they consider possible reforms intended to curb copyright and privacy infringements online.

"The power to make often implies the power to break," said Chander. "And in fact, if Congress can make the Internet, make Silicon Valley, it can also break Silicon Valley. And so Congress could do things that would make it so difficult to operate a network, an enterprise, that it's no longer profitable to do so."

Professor Anupam Chander is a leading scholar in the law of globalization and digitization, and has written widely on international law and cyber law. He is also Director of the California International Law Center at King Hall.